News

OReilly a man never lost for words

WHEN Brian Hillery accepted the chair of Independent News & Media his only concern, surely, was inheriting those five pages in the annual report that used to house the thoughts of his predecessor Sir Tony O’Reilly. He needn’t have worried. Hillery’s contribution has been cut back to a single page while O’Reilly, in his new role as group chief executive, takes us on a (unchanged) five-page tour of the industry in the idiosyncratic style that has become his trademark.

With the Irish Independent celebrating its centenary O’Reilly finds plenty of opportunities to namecheck William Martin Murphy, the paper’s founder who, we are told, was “an internationalist at heart with commercial dealings in South Africa and South America”. That hardly does justice to this towering figure. It would have taken O’Reilly at least 10 pages to give a fuller picture of Murphy who has gone down in history as the scourge